One-third of the way into Japan scholar Donald Keene’s slim, modest memoir, he recounts the predicament faced by his Japanese professor at Columbia University in the years following World War II. The professor was depressed by Japan’s defeat, Keene writes, “but he probably would have been equally depressed if America had lost the war. . . . His was the tragedy that anyone who loves two countries may experience.”

The preeminent story of our time will not be the occupation of Iraq or the war on terror, but the shift of economic, technological, and geopolitical power to the East—specifically, China. Newspaper editors have coined a name for this story—“the rise of China”—but that’s not quite right. China isn’t rising the way the United States rose from a scattering of rustic colonies to a global superpower in two centuries, or the way Japan rose from an isolated island to the world’s second-largest economy in little more than half that time. Home to 1.3 billion people, with a history measured in

In one of Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri’s better-known photos, a woman stands on a tile map of southern Italy, her sandal-clad feet atop Capri and the Bay of Naples. Of this gentle Colossus bestriding sea and craggy coast, we see only green shoes, bare ankles, and the hem of a dress. Picture taking may be a bit of magic, but geography is also just another trick of the eye: The actual world’s always bigger than we can physically embrace but not bigger than we can show. Subverting traditional landscape photography’s heroic impulse, Ghirri prized representational antics over the mere grandeur

A word of advice: Do not allow Sharon Weinberger and Nathan Hodge to plan your vacation, unless touring missile silos in the middle of Wyoming is your idea of a good time. Better to go to the beach and bring along A Nuclear Family Vacation, their entertaining travelogue-cum–history of the American nuclear-weapons industry (and its analogues in central Asia and Iran). Better still, read their book at summer’s end; though frequently amusing, A Nuclear Family Vacation is likely to dampen one’s spirits, as discussions of nuclear war will often do.

I have a pet theory about a microsegment of my generation—those whose junior high years were 1978–80—which holds that in the midst of an already “lost” generation (Generation X), there exists a subset, of which I am a member, that is more lost than the rest, having come of age at the exact moment when two cultural tectonic plates collided, heaved, and ground any hope of an integrated self-image into dust. Our older siblings were ’70s kidsdeseeding schwag weed inside Led Zeppelin II LP sleeves to roll joints for laser rock or sniffing glue on the way to CBGB. Our

Debbie Drechsler’s semiautobiographical Daddy’s Girl first ran as a series of strips in the New York Press in the early 90s. Published in book form in 1995, the graphic novel was nominated for an Ignatz Award but was sold only in comic-book stores and fell out of print. Its reissue in hardcover speaks to the lasting quality of the material and should act as a reminder that, despite the large number of similar memoirs and graphic novels published in recent years, the original strip was groundbreaking in its frank depiction of sexual abuse.

For a true music nerd, there is nothing more satisfying than listening to a piece of music, parsing out its samples, and hunting for the albums on which those sounds originally appeared. But while many fans view sampling as breathing new life into long-forgotten songs, others, of course, see it as infringement. Issues of appropriation—audio and otherwise—pervade Sound Unbound, a new anthology on digital music and culture edited by conceptual artist and musician Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid).

It’s easy to guess why a collection of writings by Ulrike Meinhof is just now being published in English: Understanding terrorists is a newly thriving field of scholarship, and the left-wing, European extremists in the Red Army Faction make a nice control group for an all-Islamist-all-the-time sample set. How did Meinhof go from upstanding citizen to anticapitalist bomber, from mother to monster? By 1972, when the fugitive Meinhof was finally captured, the RAF had been linked to dozens of bank robberies and bombings, along with the murders of several policemen, and Meinhof was sent to prison, where she eventually hanged

On June 29, 1912, Max Brod brought a shy, tongue-tied Franz Kafka to Leipzig to meet a daring young editor named Kurt Wolff. Wolff, then working for Rowohlt Verlag, read Kafka’s brief tales and published them before the year was out.